Given the massive number of incidents, financial connections, guilty pleas, detailed indictments, intelligence reports, and stragely deferential policies toward Vladimir Putin's Russia involved in the Trump-Russia scandal, it is downright cautious to say that the information currently in the public record makes it highly probably that President Trump is not only compromised by the Russian government but may well be engaged in actual treason.
Still, I would prefer to see the Democrats pushing hard for impeachment proceedings - which the timid Party establishment doesn't even want Democratic candidates to talk about in the 2018 campaigns - than try to shame Republicans into dissenting from Trump policies by escalating accusations of treson. Not that Democratic elected officials are combative enough even for that, in most cases!
The headline will no doubt send a thrill up the leg of many a Hillary hardliner. The article is about the fact that Bernie's campaign "chief strategist" in the 2016 primary campaign "in contact" with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and presumed Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnik. There is no allegation of Devine in any way cooperating with an Russian election interference. According to the article, Devine had previously worked with Manafort on lobbying work for the Russian-friendly Ukrainian government of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
And, note bene, as they say in Latin:
The former campaign chairman for President Donald Trump and Devine worked together nearly a decade ago for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Kremlin Party of Regions, and the pair remained in contact until at least 2014.
According to the new court filing, Manafort and Devine communicated by email through June 2014, about five months before he joined the Sanders campaign that November.
Devine and Sanders had worked together on campaigns in the 1990s, and the Democratic strategist has also worked as a campaign aide to Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis. [my emphasis]
Some of the Hillary hardliners have tried pretty much since Election Day to use the Trump-Russia scandal to smear Sanders and Democratic progressives, as well.
So, if Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis can be smeared with a vague guilt-by-association with dubious actors, can we really be surprised that Trump's defenders think they convince his fans that Hillary Clinton is the real Russian agent? For just one odious example: Benny Johnson, Rand Paul: The Only Person We Know Coluded With the RussiansThe Daily Caller 07/18/2018.
It's not a recent thing, either. It's been a Republican taling point for a while.
Digby Parton that tactic in Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary!Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report that week that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is looking into possible failure to register as a foreign agent by a lobbying firm considered to by close to the Democrats:
Needless to say, the right-wing media went nuts at this news. This was the hook they've been waiting for. For months they've been pushing a narrative that has Hillary Clinton as the real beneficiary of Russian manipulation, and this is supposed to be proof that connects all the dots. Rush Limbaugh has cooked up a massive conspiracy featuring President Barack Obama, Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Russians over that uranium sale from years ago that's going to blow the lid off everything. (If you can make heads or tails out of what Limbaugh says happened or will happen, take a drink. You need it.)
A New York Times story on Monday indicated that the three congressional committees that were supposed to be looking into Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, are hitting a wall. Partisan infighting and GOP lack of focus and interest are pointing toward the conclusion that nothing will be done about any of it. If Mueller's investigation comes up with something concrete, maybe they'll take another look -- but if anyone was expecting the U.S. Congress to be even slightly concerned about the propaganda campaign, the hacking or the attempts to break into actual voting systems, they're going to be disappointed. The Republicans don't give a damn about any of that and they are running the show. [my emphasis]
Trump tossed it out himself in a 2016 in what I still say was a clumsy effort by Hillary to tie Trump to Russian collusion. Trump responded in a typical, "no, your're the poopy-head" mode (Trump to Clinton: 'No, You're the Puppet'Bloomberg Politics 10/19/2016):
And, sad to say, the Republicans are just better at this kind of sleaze-slinging than the Democrats are.
This is not to say that Democrats or the left shouldn't make fact-based criticims of left-leaning arguments that Russian election interference shouldn't be considered a serious matter.
It is to say that Democrats should avoid the temptation to use treason accusations ins a cheap-shot fashion against Trump and the Republicans. The politics of treason are complicated. And the politics of combatting treason should be, also.
Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi made a deal with the Cheney-Bush Administration in 2003 to give up Libya's nuclear weapons and other unconventional weapons programs.Less than 12 years later, the Obama Administration at the urging of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed a regime change operation with included direct US, British, and French military intervention, after which Gaddafi would up dead, lynch-murdered after being anally raped with a bayonet.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said last year that Kim “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.”
“The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes,” he added, “is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”
And Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the retiring chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has regularly referred to the lessons Kim learned from Libya: “He views having deliverable nuclear weapons as his ticket to dying as an old man in his bed. He saw what happened with Gadhafi. Gadhafi’s a dead man now because he gave up his nuclear weapons,” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last week.
The one tweet that I see on Hillary Clinton's official Twitter feed on the #MarchForOurLives protests is this:
Listening to the students from Parkland and across the country today is a reminder of what is possible when our future is in the right hands, and when we match inspiration with determination. https://t.co/fhiEBIw15B
It reminded me of this statement from Hillary to a Democratic group in early 2017, "Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country." (Corky Siemaszko, Hillary To Trump Foes: Keep Up 'Resistance And Persistence'NBC News 02/24/2017)
Nothing wrong with vague inspirational slogans. Even ones with corny rhymes. But they usually don't say a lot. But if slogans like Resistance Plus Persistence or Inspiration With Determination motivate some people to constructive political engagement, that's fine.
The Russia-Trump scandal rolls on. It is and continues to be a defining element of the Trump Presidency.
I continue to maintain that it's possible and necessary to keep several things in mind simultaneously.
1. Nuclear war is a imminent risk that literally has the possibility of destroying the human race. I've always been concerned to hear the climate crisis described as the most serious risk to the future of humanity. And it is a gigantic risk for humanity, in many ways. But nuclear war is the more immediate one. And one in which irreparable damage can been done in a matter of minutes and hours rather than decades and centuries.
2. The US and Russia have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The two countries need to be cooperating to reduce their own stockpiles and to promote international nuclear arms reduction. It's inevitable that in some way, other issues in bilateral relations will affect arms control. But both countries should make real efforts to decouple the nuclear negotiations from other issues.
3. The US and Russia routinely interfere in each other's politics in ways legitimate and illegitimate. And that will continue. Both countries have a legitimate national interest in minimizing such interference. But it's worthwhile for everyone to keep the rhetoric of moralistic outrage within sensible limits. Even if the Other Side does not.
4. Putin's government is a rightwing, authoritarian, oligarchic regime. And apart from any illegal interference in elections in other countries, diplomatically and by example it promotes such regimes in Europe and the United States. But that doesn't mean that everything the Russian government does in internal or foreign policy is unworthy of practical evaluation by observers that aren't also flaming rightwingers.
5. The evidence we have so far about Russian interference in the 2016 election is serious. Much of what is in the public record may be circumstantial. But some of it, like Donald Trump, Jr. expressing obvious willingness to accept oppo research material directly from a shady Russian source, is fairly explicit. It needs to be seriously investigated, as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller seems to be doing.
6. Many Republicans and some on the antiwar left are still insisting that there is no evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 election. I'm still saying now what I I've been saying at least since January of last year, when the formal report was released by the Director of National Intelligence. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA are all saying that it's very likely that the Russian government did so. And with a slightly lower level of confidence on the part of the NSA, that Russia passed the DNC material to Wikileaks. That needs to be taken seriously. The public should not take it on faith. Either a serious Congressional review, which is unlikely to happen with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress, or one by some sort of genuinely independent commission needs to be done so that the public can have better confidence in those findings.
7. The neoliberal shock-therapy economics pushed onto post-Soviet Russia first by Old Man Bush's Administration and then by the Clinton Administration was a serious failure, unless you're an oligarch who came out on top. Including massive involvement in Russian internal politics. Time cover 07/15/1996:
8. The Clinton Administration and the Cheney-Bush Administration were both reckless in the eastward expansion of NATO. That doesn't mean that the expansion could be easily rolled back, even if the major NATO members wanted to do so. Russia's military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine are understandable in real-political terms as a response to NATO expansion. That does not mean that the Russian motives were pure, or that the West has to formally accept the formal annexation of the Crimea, other portions of Ukraine, and parts of Georgia. But it doesn't mean that Western policymakers need to be realistic in understanding what military threats those may pose for NATO. Including recognizing how destruction Western regime-change temptations in other countries have often been.
9. The Democrats have a mixed record on how they've handled the Trump-Russia issue. They are very right to insist that it be taken seriously. They haven't always been as careful as they should have about taking public postures that appeared to go well beyond the information in the public record. Take this exchange with Hillary Clinton in one of the Presidential debates, Trump to Clinton: 'No, You're the Puppet'Bloomberg Politics 10/19/2016:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government. The USIC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assess that it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion. This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place. States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process.
This was serious. But not as specific as the January 2017 DNI public report.
Trump had made a public comment saying he hoped Russia had access to Clinton's emails the Republicans were claiming showed misconduct on her part. We know now that this statement came after the notorious Trump Tower meeting of Don Jr. with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But that was not in the public record at the time of that debate.
Hillary also used the phrase "17 intelligence agencies" that she said agreed on the finding quoted above. When I heard that in the debate, my first thought was, "We have 17 intelligence agencies?" I also didn't recall it being reported that way and wondered if she weren't gilding the lily there. We the DNI issued the January 2017 public report, it was very explicit that the findings were based on the work of the three agencies that would be expected to focus on counterintelligence efforts: the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. If we count the Office of the DNI, that adds up to four intelligence agencies, not 17.
In retrospect, it's hard not to wonder if Hillary hadn't received some more substantial information on Trump's dealings with Russia. But it's hard to believe that her charge in October 2016 that Trump was a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin was credible to anyone but the most uncritically partisan Democrats.
10. The mainstream media have indulged in some of the same kind of carelessness. Rachel Maddow has spent the last year smirking and cracking smug jokes about Trump and the Russians and spinning unflattering scenarios about the possible implications of each new bit on news on Trump-Russia that are sometimes long on imagination and short on analysis. Going for sensationalism is a big and understandable temptation. But it makes the real picture harder to understand rather than easier.
11. Focusing on Russia trying to interfere with the 2016 election is a necessary and important thing. Trying to argue that the Russians were responsible for Trump's Electoral College win is a much more speculative matter, one that is almost impossible to prove. Any realistic analysis has to take into account other major factors, particular low turnout of the core Obama voters in some key states.
On the other hand, McClatchy reported last month, "The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency." (Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump 01/18/2018). The NRA did spend significant amounts supporting Trump:
... the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.
Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts. [my emphasis]
There are no legal charges against the NRA over this. If, and I stress if, it turns out that they did take money illegally from Russia and they used it for get-out-the-vote operations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, then we could talk in more concrete terms about direct effects on the outcomes. I hope the way I'm describing this indicates what a long shot possibility I think that is.
11. There are people who would like to use the Trump-Russia scandal to promote agendas that have more to do with ginning up wars than protecting American elections. Professional warmongers like Max Boot and Butcher's-Bill Kristol are unlikely to be opposing Trump because they think he's too likely to start wars. Unfortunately, some leading Democrats are using the scandal to try to pose as tougher on foreign policy than the Republicans without offering a peace vision of what a new direction in foreign policy could be.
12. It's possible and useful to counter that hawkish agenda without echoing Republican talking points about there being "no proof" of the Trump-Russia connection.
13. The circumstantial evidence makes it possible that there will be instances exposed of high-level Trump campaign co-operation with Russian emissaries, some of which will be shown to be seriously illegal. Obstructing justice in the official investigation, lying to the FBI, lying to Congress, lying to the FBI are serious crimes in the themselves. But those crimes could also be strong circumstantial evidence of underlying bad acts and/or crimes. But the most serious Trump-Russia connections could also very likely be in the Trump Organization's financial and business dealing with Russian entities rather than campaign collusion as such.
This interview with Russian expert Stephen Cohen cautions about careless accusations. I think Cohen tends to downplay the seriousness of the evidence on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and Trump's vulnerability to blackmail or manipulation by the Putin government. But he's worth listening to. Russiagate is Dangerous, Will Washington Get the Memo? 02/02/2018:
The public status of the Russia-Russia-Russia scandal, aka, the Trump-Russia scandal, Russia-gate, in some ways is remarkably similar to what it was a year ago before Trump took office.
The NSA, the CIA and the FBI have all found that the Russian government leadership, i.e., Vladimir Putin, was behind the hacking of emails from the DNC. Qualified analysts outside the government have verified the plausibility of the claims. News about various meetings with Russian officials have now been publicly reported and acknowledged by participants, some of whom have been dishonest or remarkably reticent to talk about those meetings with law enforcement. As Digby Parton writes, "Trump's behavior" - and that of his campaign - "certainly appears to show what prosecutors call a 'consciousness of guilt.'" (More signs of guilt: Trump’s campaign was warned about Russia, and said nothingSalon 12/19/2017)
But lying about those meetings or Michael Flynn or failing to report business dealings with Russians that were required to be disclosed don't in themselves prove collusion. Although some of the emails that have made it into the public record] sound remarkably similar to what someone would say who was colluding.
But obviously, there are reasons disclosure laws affecting financial holdings and foreign contacts are there, including to avoid officials with high security clearances or major governmental responsibilities being subjected to pressure by a foreign government to commit illegal acts. The familiar saying that presumably emerged during the Watergate scandal that it's not the crime that gets you, it's the coverup, is misleading insofar as it might be taken to mean that laws broken in the process of a coverup aren't all that important in themselves.
The reports from the intelligence agencies on Russian election interference are serious. And they still deserve today as they did a year ago to be competently investigated by Congressional committees or independent commissions that will be able to access classified information that can't safely be released to the public. If the intelligence agencies were lying or incompetent in those reports, that needs to be known, too. That need is there today just as it was a year ago. Unfortunately, the Republican-led Congressional investigations aren't proceeding with the seriousness they deserve.
The Russia investigation is also likely to provide a lot of inconvenient details about the Trump family's business dealings, some of which could well be illegal though unrelated to collusion with Russia on the 2016 election interference.
But I've always been worried that warhawks of different varieties were jumping on the Russia-Russia-Russia bandwagon for purposes of promoting bad foreign policy rather than securing American elections.
And there were also people who wanted to use a Russia smear against people to the left of corporate Democrats, both within the Democratic Party and outside.
But I did a real double-take at just after the 5:00 point, where she is talking about potential female candidates for President in 2020: "And now that some of the potential 2020 candidates are starting to get public attention, they're getting hit, from both the left and the right, and sometimes, when it comes from the left, you're not sure if it's a Russian pretending to be an American on the left or not." (my emphasis) Just a gratuitous dig at lefties as being Commies ... uh, Russians. Now, sure, the Russian government might want to stir up animosities of all sorts. But from what we know of the much-reported Russian attempts to muddle up Western elections, the bulk of the interventions are on the side of promoting rightwing nationalist parties and movements. But there's Hillary, talking about sexism from "the left and the right" and it's the left she suspects of being Rooskies. Corporate Democrats sometimes just can't help themselves.
Prior to 2000, we called this Red-baiting. But through the mysteries of language evolution, "red" in the United States now typically refers to Republicans, not to Communists or Socialists. Go figure.
But that kind of thing has always been a double-edged sword for the center-left, of which corporate Democrats are the most visible expression in American politics right now. In the first part of that interview (separate video), Hillary talks about the demands of some Republicans to open new investigations against her. Talk that seems to be getting louder. And Democrats have good reason to be very dubious about the investigation of Jill Stein of the Green Party for possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
McFaul was US Ambassador to Russia 2012-14, so he has high-level experience diplomatic subtleties. But it's hard to imagine that he doesn't know he's really reaching in this interview to make Stein sound like a Russian colluder. His argument is that she has appeared voluntarily on RT and, while she was in Russia for the now-infamous RT celebration, she had some compliments for Russian foreign policy. Good grief! If the standard for "collusion" is expressing an opinion about US foreign policy while in a foreign country, at least half the tourists in other countries would be guilty of collusion. Unless I've missed Congress passing a law requiring US travelers abroad to clear every comment they make with political implications to be pre-screened by the State Department, this kind of criticism McFaul makes here is clearly off the tracks.
Cenk Uygur had a spot-on commentary about the Jill Stein collaboration accusation, including McFaul's version, in this Young Turks segment. He makes the very sensible point that the Democrats playing along with this is just the sort of thing that will help the Republicans undercut the Democrats' insistence that seriously investigating the Russian intervention in the 2016 election, including the role of Trump campaign staff who may have actively colluded with it. Jill Stein Targeted By Russia Investigation 12/21/2017:
Stein has discussed the circumstances of the dinner on numerous occasions, and even publicized the event herself at the time. “No names were exchanged, no eye contact, nada,” she reiterated. “Just a quick handshake—that’s it. There was nothing meaningful at that dinner.”
But Stein says transparency should trump any other concern, and she intends to comply to the fullest possible extent with the Senate committee—if only to highlight its inanity. “There’s plenty of room to critique what this investigation is about, and we will do that in parallel,” she said.
Stein characterized the Senate inquest as part of a political climate which has seen “a resurgence of McCarthyism,” and asserts that media coverage that portrays her as party to some sinister global conspiracy is wildly irresponsible. “The standards of journalism exercised in the discussion of Russia-gate are abysmal,” she said. “There are no consequences for the reporters who basically launched these extremely irresponsible and destructive stories that diminish the stature of the press and that legitimizes the charge of fake news. So yeah, it’s full of crap.”
Frontline PBS recently ran a two-part documentary called Putin's Revenge, focused on the story of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Part 1 focuses on Putin's experiences with and understanding of US foreign policy.
Part 2 deals more specifically with the events of 2016 in connection with Russian hacking and the US election.
Frontline has also made available hours of background interviews of the authorities quoted in the documentary. Since they largely deal with the same set of events and questions, they do begin to sound a bit repetitive after a while. But they do provide a wide range of views, all largely within a safely Establishment perspective. Which, of course, has its advantages and disadvantages.
My most interesting and informative of the ones I've listened to so far is this one, The Putin Files: Julia Ioffe, which is 1 3/4 hours long. Her columns the past year for The Atlantic on Russia have also been helpful. Unlike our typical Pod Pundits on TV, she tells stories like you would hope a journalist would. She's very good in relating a chronological narrative. And she's careful to include a lot of factual detail and meaningful context. And she gives the appearance of trying to stick with confirmed facts, or at a minimum to explain what sources on which she's relying. That emerges at the start of the interview, where she responds to the question on whether the highest levels of Russian government knew about the hacking of the Democratic Party and election system in 2016.
Her account is also notably useful in that she conveys an image of how Putin was likely to have understood events that affected him and his political career. Understanding how the "other side" sees itself is something our TV pundits aren't generally very good about doing. Understanding isn't defending, and explaining isn't defending. But it's easy for people in politics and especially international politics to forget about those two things.
Celeste Wallander's interview in interesting in that she recounts the Ukraine crisis of 2013 as though the US is a de facto military ally of the US, The Putin Files: Celeste Wallander 10/25/2017.
Although she also recognizes that the Russians had the ability and the intent to escalate with additional Russian troops if they judged it necessary.
Victoria Nuland strikes me as a particularly unsympathetic public figure, and this interview didn't do anything to disabuse me of that impression, The Putin Files: Victoria Nuland 10/25/2017:
She insists on starting off by making the dubious point that the Clinton Administration was serious in trying to make Russia a part of NATO in the early 1990s. Of the interviews in this series that I've heard, Nuland's seemed the most carefully worded to further a hawkish foreign policy narrative. She talks as though the US approach in everything she's talking about are obviously pure and noble. And manages to sound condescending and remarkably smug through most of it. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think that someone who can keep an expression like this for most of a 1 1/4 hour interview is probably trying to con her listeners:
It's striking in her interview that she speaks as if Russia had no legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion. Which reinforces the perception that she's making a hawkish political pitch rather than speaking as a foreign policy expert in a more technical sense here.
Nuland is so immersed in Cold War hawkish thinking that she even rolls out the hoary old Domino Theory for Europe today. Just after 47:00, we hear this interchange:
Frontline: Of course, there's another argument that some people have come in here and said, which is, [if] you don't stop Putin there, y'know, where do you stop Putin, when do you stop Putin, that's the moment.
Nuland: Well, that was the argument that those of us favoring at least defense lethal systems made, was that, you know, if he really wanted it, he would be in Kiev, and the next thing you knew he would be in Warsaw if we weren't careful.
One difference: Poland is a member of the NATO mutual-defense alliance. Ukraine is not. Nuland's words would indicate that she doesn't understand even a basic distinction like that. (I'm guessing she's faking it on that point!)
From this interview, I would have to conclude that her only regret about the 2013 Ukraine crisis is that we didn't Americanize the conflict and expand the war even more.
This interview with a former Obama adviser gives us an idea of how it sounds for someone to take Putin's outlook seriously - whether it's right or wrong - as contrasted with the strict advocacy perspective of Victoria Nuland, The Putin Files: Antony Blinken 10/25/2017:
Just after 16:30, Blinken straightforwardly explains the basic fact that makes Nuland's point about Putin marching from Kiev to Warsaw is so silly, that Poland is a NATO member.
New York Times Reporter David Sanger's interview is also notable it his seemingly pragmatic and realistic take on the topics covered, The Putin Files: David Sanger 10/25/2017:
Much of screen time on the two-part documentary itself is composed of excerpts from the set of interviews that Frontline placed on YouTube and from which these five were taken.
Joe Conason, co-author with Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), has addressed two sets of Clinton pseudoscandals. Uranium One is a relatively new entry in the portfolio of Clinton pseudoscandals. The allegation is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was bribed by Russians via the Clinton Foundation into approving the sale of a company named Uranium One to a state-owned Russian company, Rosatom.
Neither the House Republicans nor Sessions have yet explained how the Clintons could have controlled the disposition of Uranium One's assets. Nor have they explained how the Uranium One deal, which prohibited the Russians from selling so much as an ounce of uranium ore outside the borders of the United States, could have endangered American national security.
And they have also failed to explain why the entire deal matters anyway, since the portion of U.S. reserves owned by Uranium One represents a tiny fraction of a fraction — a tenth of 1% — of the world's uranium supply, most of which comes from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.
He sketches out the claim here:
Through a complex series of business deals, Russia had obtained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves, using a Vancouver-based company called Uranium One. Some of the Canadian investors who profited from the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation, had given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
Russia's acquisition of American uranium had been approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. And Bill Clinton had received a $500,000 fee for a speech delivered in Moscow at a bank that had some connection with Uranium One.
What weakened that apparently damning story was a single big flaw: Hillary Clinton never had the sole authority to sign off on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians, but held only a single seat on a government panel that included members from nine agencies, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
What Conason doesn't say, though I think it's important, is that the laws are far too permissive on ways that donors and/or bribers (sometimes there is no difference) can channel money to candidates and campaigns. Payments to a candidates spouse of, say, $500,000 for a single speech - and even the prospect of earning such speaking fees after leaving office - certainly can be used in that way. But it's not at all clear that such a thing occurred in the Uranium One deal, or that the payments to the Clinton Foundation were in any way illegal. It looks like a pure pseudoscandal to me.
But I see this problem in the larger context of the Citizens' United campaign-funding regime, which is an oligarchical system that inevitably creates de facto corruption, even if much of it is de jure legal.
And, of course, our Pod Pundits can never resist a return to the Bill Clinton Penis Hunt of the 1990s. And the Republicans are skilled in playing to that obsession and to the corporate media's posture of trying to provide a Both Sides Do It phony equivalency between the Democratic and Republican parties on all issues.
So it took only a few days after the Roy Moore sex scandals broke for the Republicans to get the media back on the BCPH again. And there are always Democrats feckless enough to play the same game. Conason addresses the Return Of The BCPH in A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million ProbeNational Memo 11/17/2017:
Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books ....
Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.
And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.
He also reminds us of the eager but unsuccessful results of Kenneth Starr to validate the claims of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two favorite icons of the latest BCPH. Which, for the Republicans, will apparently never goes away. I expect them to be harping on it 50 years from now. He also reminds us of the outcome of Paula Jones' charges.
Even after all this time, I still feel stunned when I'm reminded by an article like this how ridiculous the Clinton pseudoscandals lumped under the "Whitewater" rubric really were.
It was the New York Times that vaulted the Whitewater affair into a national issue by its credulous reporting in 1992, which was very competently dissected by Conason and Lyons in The Hunting of the President, and earlier by Lyons in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), and in the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President.
So the NYT at least deserves credit for reporting on the final report of the special counsel in the Whitewater case, headed in its last phase by Robert Ray, Final Report By Prosecutor On Clintons Is Released 03/21/2002
In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel's office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.
Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons' principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.
The report concluded the long legal melodrama that resulted in Mr. Clinton's impeachment and sharply split the nation about whether he was the victim of a politically motivated criminal investigation or had truly committed substantial offenses.
The whole underlying pseudoscandal around Whitewater turned out to have been completely bogus.
Donna Brazile made a splash in Democratic politics on Thursday with this excerpt from her forthcoming book, Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNCPolitico 11/02/2017. Brazile, who served as acting head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the second half of 2016, explains previous non-public details about the already painfully obvious fact that the DNC tilted heavily toward Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
The story provides a surprisingly clear picture of the malfunctioning of the DNC.
The "money laundering" referred to in connection with this story is legal, if politically and ethically questionable. Politico had reported on that aspect of the story in 2016: Kenneth Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf, Clinton fundraising leaves little for state parties 05/02/2016. [Update: Charlie Pierce writes that the May story "was fatally flawed," although his objection seems to be that he takes the earlier story to imply incorrectly implied that there had been something illegal about the fund-sharing arrangement at issue: The Democratic Party Is Finding a Way to F*ck This UpEsquire Politics Blog 11/03/2017.]
Yes, the chronic Hillary-haters on the Republican side will have their own weird twists on this story. But the story is about a real problem that was a major part of the 2016 election process that ended up putting an unstable Orange Clown in the White House.
Russia's attempted interference in the 2016 US Presidential election is a serious concern. And, as I've been saying all year, should be carefully investigated and the facts put before the American public.
But Russian propaganda bots aren't going to be any "smoking gun" that would expose criminal acts of collusion by the Trump campaign. The financial connections look far more promising as a source of such legal problems, and the most promising route to uncovering any actual acts of collusion on the campaign. I'm speculating, of course, based on what we know in the public record so far.
But I've always worried that the Democrats were taking a careless approach to the Russian election-interference issue, too carelessly trying to blame Russian interference for Hillary's loss and treating any contact with Russians, or involvement with Russian business, or even agree with Russia's position on an issue as per se a sign of a sinister association or allegiance.
In researching the events of 1917 in Russia in connection with the posts I'm doing around the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, one of the intriguing historical issues I've focused on is the "German gold" issues, i.e., the claim that the Bolshevik Party was being heavily financed by the German Kaiser and even acting on his behalf. I'll deal with that issue in a later post. But the accusation involves companies allegedly used by to launder the funds from the German Treasury to the Bolsheviks. It's a fascinating piece of historical forensic accounting.
The record-keeping on international financial transactions is much more elaborate today than in 1917. But so are the possibilities of setting up shell companies and money-laundering operations. Which can be difficult enough for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to unravel. And even more difficult to boil down to clear and coherent claims that will be effective for use in real-time political debates.
I was reminded of these difficulties by a couple of different kinds of story recently. Julia Ioffe, who has done some of the most level-headed reporting and commentary on the Russia election interference, writes about The History of Russian Involvement in America's Race WarsAtlantic 10/21/2017. She describes briefly how the Soviet Union incorporated racial discrimination in America into their international propaganda. And she makes it very clear that they were for the most part using real events and problems:
This came at a critical time for time for the United States. After World War II, the U.S. was a new global power locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the United States tried to convince countries to join its sphere by taking up democracy and liberal values, the U.S. government was competing with the Soviets in parts of the world where images of white cops turning fire hoses and attack dogs on black protesters did not sit well—especially considering that this was coinciding with the wave African countries declaring independence from white colonial rulers. “Here at the United Nations I can see clearly the harm that the riots in Little Rock are doing to our foreign relations,” Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote to President Eisenhower in 1957. “More than two-thirds of the world is non-white and the reactions of the representatives of these people is easy to see. I suspect that we lost several votes on the Chinese communist item because of Little Rock.”
“The Russian objective then was to disrupt U.S. international relations and undermine U.S. power in the world, and undermine the appeal of U.S. democracy to other countries,” says [historian Mary] Dudziak, and Lodge was reflecting a central concern at the State Department at the time: The Soviet propaganda was working. American diplomats were reporting back both their chagrin and the difficulty of preaching democracy when images of the violence around the civil rights movement were reported all over the world, and amplified by Soviet or communist propaganda. On a trip to Latin America, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife were met with protestors chanting, “Little Rock! Little Rock!” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that “this situation was ruining our foreign policy. The effect of this in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians.” Ultimately, he prevailed on Eisenhower to insert a passage into his national address on Little Rock that directly addressed the discrepancy that Soviet propaganda was highlighting—and spinning as American hypocrisy. Whenever the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights abuses, the rebuttal became, “And you lynch Negroes.”
This is standard fare in international diplomacy and politics. If Country A criticizes Country B over some human rights issue or violation of international law, Country B can always find something to throw back in Country A's face along the same lines.
And it's also common as dirt in politics to refer to what people in other countries are thinking and saying about an issue. Our Allies will think we're unreliable! Credibility in the world! Our example to the world! The US narrative that we should be the lighthouse to the world, the city on the hill, the model for the Free World, that everybody in the world wants to be like America, is such a well-established framing for political rhetoric in the US that worrying about foreign opinion is an everyday concern in foreign affairs and thus in domestic politics.
At the same time, being sucked by an unfriendly power is considered not only dastardly, but evidence of un-Americanism and acting on behalf of a foreign power. Segregationists have always argued that civil rights advocates were Communists and therefore agents of a foreign power, particularly as long as the Soviet Union still existed. And I assume that may be what motivated these tweets from Rebecca Pierce in response to Ioffe's article:
Anti-Blacknesss is reducing Civil Rights struggle to a Cold War propagand tool and giving US govt the credit. Y’all don’t see us as people pic.twitter.com/i8hTxIeUcC
I didn't have that impression that's what Ioffe was trying to do in that article. But it also struck me in reading it that it could easily be misused by others in that way. Maybe too easy.
A different kind of foreign involvement story is also in the news this week. More on Hillary and the uranium: John Solomon and Alison Spann, FBI watched, then acted as Russian spy moved closer to Hillary ClintonThe Hill 10/22/17. The story says explicitly, "There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department."
Of course they were. That's what all countries do. Unless they have too few resources to attempt it. I thought as I was reading this, the story does remind us once again that the Clintons should have been more scrupulous in their conduct of the Clinton Foundation to avoid an appearance of improper influence at work.
But Clinton pseudoscandals have been a minor industry since the New York Times broke its first Whitewater story. And the mainstream media continue to eat them up even decades later. And the Republicans don't even need the appearance of wrongdoing to rave about new Clinton pseudoscandals. So, no surprise here: Olivia Beavers, House GOP leaders open probe into FBI's handling of Clinton investigationThe Hill 10/24/17
Digby Parton looks at this latest Republican ploy in Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary!Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report this week that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is looking into possible failure to register as a foreign agent by a lobbying firm considered to by close to the Democrats:
Needless to say, the right-wing media went nuts at this news. This was the hook they've been waiting for. For months they've been pushing a narrative that has Hillary Clinton as the real beneficiary of Russian manipulation, and this is supposed to be proof that connects all the dots. Rush Limbaugh has cooked up a massive conspiracy featuring President Barack Obama, Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Russians over that uranium sale from years ago that's going to blow the lid off everything. (If you can make heads or tails out of what Limbaugh says happened or will happen, take a drink. You need it.)
A New York Times story on Monday indicated that the three congressional committees that were supposed to be looking into Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, are hitting a wall. Partisan infighting and GOP lack of focus and interest are pointing toward the conclusion that nothing will be done about any of it. If Mueller's investigation comes up with something concrete, maybe they'll take another look -- but if anyone was expecting the U.S. Congress to be even slightly concerned about the propaganda campaign, the hacking or the attempts to break into actual voting systems, they're going to be disappointed. The Republicans don't give a damn about any of that and they are running the show. [my emphasis]
The respectable posturing by Republican figures like Shrub Bush and Bob Corker is entertaining. But until the Republicans start taking Trump's misconduct seriously enough to investigate the Russian interference in the election and Trump's own questionable behavior as possibly impeachable offenses, it's hard to take them seriously.
"I don't understand people who trash talk about America, who talk about us as being in decline, who act as though we are not yet the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." Hillary Clinton to the VFW 07/25/2016 (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National ConventionTelegraph)
I thought I had blogged about this before. But I don't find it in a search.
So let's just say this is the kind of thing that American politicians should stop saying. Not only does it sound arrogant. It invites, maybe demands, really bad foreign policy decisions.
Ironically, this came as part of her not very impressive attempt to counter Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan with something along the lines of, hey, whaddya mean, America's already great, how could anyone thing everything's not just fine? ("I don't understand people who trash talk about America ...")
So while her words out-jingoed Trump's, she was still tone-deaf to how her Stronger Together campaign theme conveyed an attitude of complancy when she needed a convey a sense of urgency to the Democratic base and a sense of empathy to the millions of potential swing voters who weren't feeling that conditions weren't so great for them. The Clinton Era had its strong points. But it belongs to the past.
Also, if the United States really is the greatest imaginable country ever created in the entire history of every universe that might possibly exist in any dimension ... it would be a bit more seemly for American leaders and officials should let people from other countries be the ones to say it. Or from other universes or dimensions or whatever.
"I was shocked and appalled by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein," Clinton said in a statement through her spokesman Nick Merrill. "The behavior described by women coming forward cannot be tolerated. Their courage and the support of others is critical in helping to stop this kind of behavior."
Weinstein is a longtime associate of the Clintons and a major Democratic Party donor who bundled funds for the party's political campaigns, including supporting both of Clinton's presidential bids.
Pretty straightforward. She condemned the kind of behavior "described by women coming forward" without claiming any special capacity to judge the particulars. Works for me.
****************************
There are some serious shortcomings to our US mainstream media. One of the worst, and most pathological, is their susceptibility to Clinton pseudoscandals.
Another is their willingness to follow the lead of the Republican Party and their media universe (FOX News, Wall Street Journal but also Breitbart News and Drudge) in their selection of reporting and punditry priorities.
So the media squawking about how Democrats and "Hollywood" are not condemning Harvey Weinstein widely and severely enough is largely a continuation of those same bad habits. "Hollywood" having been a rightwing codeword for "Jews" since at least the 1930s and also common Republican code for "decadent liberal elites."
With all those qualifications, I still consider it legitimate for the media and political activists to ask about Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's positions on the apparently well-founded accusations against Weinstein.
The Weinstein allegations aren't some frivolous pseudoscandal. The Times story reported:
During [the last 30 years], after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements.
In a statement to The Times on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Weinstein said: “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.”
He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to “deal with this issue head on.” [my emphasis]
So it's legitimate for them to be asked to address the matter.
I can appreciate that for reasons of general prudence, and even for legal caution, that even a major public figure like Obama or the Clintons would be cautious about speaking with certainty about possible criminal acts of which they themselves don't have direct personal knowledge.
But they are politicians! They know how to mealy-mouth. Which means they know how to condemn the acts that are being publicly alleged and apparently at least in part acknowledged by Weinstein and his company without passing inappropriate judgments about accusations of which they previously didn't have direct knowledge. As long as the donations their campaigns received from him were legal and they didn't play any specific role in helping him duck personal or legal responsibility for his actions, there's no reason his support should tarnish their reputations.
Adam Schiff does it here:
I represent Hollywood. Should go without saying, but abuse, assault and harassment of women is intolerable. By Weinstein, Trump or anyone.
But the corporate Democrats are currently promoting themselves as the defenders of civil rights for women and minorities while trying to smear the New Deal wing of the Party as sexist "BernieBros" who denigrate women. So it's perfectly fair for people to wonder what their current leading feminist icon has to say about the Weinstein scandal. Corporate media pathologies nothwithstanding.
While I'm on the topic, I think Jessica Valenti is an excellent political writer and analyst of women's issues. But this vague comment, coming in the midst of a group of tweets about the Weinstein scandal, doesn't strike me as constructive:
Imagine how different the world would be if we just believed women.
Obviously, questionable assertions and outright lies are told regularly by both men and women about public officials and prominent business and political figures. And even the most serious accusations have to be proven in legal cases like lawsuits or sexual assault charges.
And in the Weinstein case, not only are actresses like Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan going on the record publicly, but there are a wide range of accusations and even some kind of recognition of their legitimacy on the part of Weinstein himself. This is not a case whether there is a single accusation that just has to be believed or rejected. It's not a matter of believing women in the abstract. It's a matter of substantial evidence being presented over a long period of time about some very serious kinds of misconduct.
Star pollster Stanley Greenberg gives his take on the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign in How She LostThe American Prospect 09/21/2017. The narrowness of the margins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that put Trump over the top in the Electoral College makes the effort to identify any one of them as decisive a nearly hopeless cause.
Greenberg focuses on what he sees as technical failings of the campaign itself:
The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office. For me, the most glaring examples include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing “trust problem” or to learn from events and reposition.
Greenberg's account seems to rely on the conventional understanding of "white working class" that has started to drive me up the wall, i.e., white people without a four-year college degree. Even carving out "white working class" as distinct target group is problematic. The academic word "intersectionality" has been creeping into the general political vocabulary recently, a concept which looks at the effects of the overlapping of socially significant identities. "White" and "working class" would be an example of the intersection of particular race and class identities. I just wish that such intersections were discussed in a more nuanced way in political analysis and commentary. In that example, a more meaningful treatment would need to come up with a more sociologically significant understanding of working class, e.g., people who are (or should be) eligible to join a union.
The current polemical posture of corporate Democratic moderates in intra-party disputes with progressives is to treat any kind of emphasis on focusing on class issues and emphasizing advocacy of working-class issues as being opposed to civil rights and feminist goals. That keeps the waters on such discussions muddled. Not least because of a real history of American left groups playing off one such set of issues by pandering to the conservative side on others. For instance, advocates for female suffrage sometimes argued that it would provide a more reliable block of votes to preserve white dominance or protection against immigrants. Labor unions have often not treated racial and gender discrimination seriously enough, or even taken conservative positions on them. Such examples are not hard to find in American history.
But I'm particularly impressed with Greenberg's evaluation of the complacency aspect of Hillary's campaign. One big part of it was relying on a kind of demographic determinism:
Clinton and the campaign acted as if “demographics is destiny” and a “rainbow coalition” was bound to govern. Yes, there is a growing “Rising American Electorate,” but as Page Gardner and I wrote at the outset of this election, you must give people a compelling reason to vote. I have demonstrated for my entire career that a candidate must target white working-class voters, too.
Not surprisingly, Clinton took her biggest hit in Michigan, where she failed to campaign in Macomb County, the archetypal white working-class county. That was the opposite of her husband’s approach. Bill Clinton visibly campaigned in Macomb, the black community in Detroit, and elsewhere.
The fatal conclusion the Clinton team made after the Michigan primary debacle was that she could not win white working-class voters, and that the “rising electorate” would make up the difference.
He describes how Hillary's message was complicated in a big way by the Obama Administration's insistence on presenting their accomplishments in the best light. Instead of, say, emphasizing how many important things had been blocked by obstructionist Republican majorities:
Obama’s America was not a country in pain, but one where those left behind were looking for a seasoned leader to make progress. Obama and Clinton lived in a cosmopolitan and professional America that wasn’t very angry about the state of the country, even if many of the groups in the Clinton coalition were struggling and angry. Clinton decided only reluctantly to qualify that narrative in favor of one more sensitive to those who were left behind.
Obama’s refrain was severely out of touch with what was happening to most Americans and the working class more broadly. In our research, “ladders of opportunity” fell far short of what real people were looking for. Incomes sagged after the financial crisis, pensions lost value, and many lost their housing wealth, while people faced dramatically rising costs for things that mattered—health care, education, housing, and child care. People faced vanishing geographic, economic, and social mobility, as Edward Luce writes so forcefully. At the same time, billionaires spent massively to influence politicians and parked their money in the big cities whose dynamism drew in the best talent from the smaller towns and rural areas.
Clinton’s default position was Obama’s refrain about America ... [my emphasis]
Greenberg draws on contemporary polling data to argue that when Hillary did strike a Sanders-like position on economic issues, it drew a positive response from voters.
Greenberg focuses on the horse race rather than the policy substance. So he doesn't really address how that complacent approach on the economy is also consistent with the corporate Democratic instinct that what is good for bank CEO's is good for America.
"At the heart of the problem is that when it came to what conservatives were willing to believe and act on, 2016 was simply an exaggerated version of what had come before."
Paul Waldman has that and other valuable observations in a nevertheless overly cynical column, Democrats' Unsolvable Media ProblemThe American Prospect 09/17/2017:
There's a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It's not merely about the conservatives' and liberals' respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It's that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it's all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It's the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.
Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don't do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.
Where I think Waldman goes wrong is that he effectively concludes that this gives conservatives a decisive advantage that liberals can never overcome.
And yet, somehow Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate dearly hated by the right, won a clear majority in the 2016 Presidential election.
I don't say that to minimize the magnitude of the Democratic political disaster in 2016. It was genuinely historic.
But it shouldn't be used to justify cynicism, no matter how sophisticated the packaging. Cynicism in politics for most people is virtually the same as conservatism.
Sophia McClennen of Pennsylvania State University has a thoughtful piece about The great Hillary Clinton paradoxSalon 09/16/2017. McClennen sees the paradox as, on the one hand, Hillary claims that her prominent position as a woman in politics is a great strength and a reason to vote for her. And, on the other, she and her followers often seem to be trying to minimize or divert criticism by treating it as just a manifestation of sexism:
Unlike her run for the nomination in 2008, in 2016 the Clinton campaign specifically emphasized her role as a female candidate. She also had to contend with the aggressively hostile ways that Donald Trump and his supporters hurled sexist and misogynist epithets her way. From chants of “lock her up” to “nasty woman” to the various other ways that Trump displayed his disdain for women, the “woman card” was constantly in play.
But at times Clinton cast her role as a female candidate as a way to displace legitimate concerns that she was a Washington insider. Recall that in the first debate she responded to the question of being an insider by saying, “Well, I can’t think of anything more of an outsider than electing the first woman president, but I’m not just running because I would be the first woman president.”
And therein lies one key feature of the paradox: she both was and wasn’t running as a woman. That feature of the paradox was indisputable. Whether she highlighted her gender or not, it was certainly true that she had to contend with gender as a framing issue of her candidacy.
The question of whether Clinton could or should have found her own mad voice during the campaign hangs over What Happened. Should she have turned on Donald Trump as he paced behind her at the second debate, she wonders. Could she have found a way to communicate the anger many Americans were feeling? “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired,” she writes, describing the mental diagnostics she was performing as she listened to Trump’s wrathful inauguration, wondering if “maybe that’s why Trump was now delivering the inaugural address.”
But if her failure to win the Electoral College hinged on Clinton’s inability to traffic in rhetorical fury, then the question she raises goes beyond her own wiring. Because she never could have turned around and screamed at Trump, never could have slashed her finger through the air and called for revolution in the style of Bernie Sanders, at least not if she had any hope of winning the presidency. Hillary Clinton is a woman, and there is almost nothing that Americans view as more repellent in women than anger.
Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back; consider that the one deprecatory remark she threw out — calling those who responded enthusiastically to Trump’s open racism “deplorables” — is still regarded by many pundits as her fatal error. Never mind that she said it while running against a candidate who called Mexicans rapists. Censorious anger from women is a liability; from men, it is often, simply, speech. [my emphasis]
There's a long time piece of cynical wisdom that says that when a man shows anger, he's called forceful. But when a woman shows anger, she's called a bitch. This is often used in the context of how women have to avoid pitfalls in rising professionally in the hierarchy of corporations and other large organizations.
But this now standard piece of conventional wisdom was always flawed in that inappropriate or uncontrolled anger is usually seen as very much an undesirable trait in male corporate managers, as well. Flying off the handle is generally seen as risky, and the more risky the more responsibility and public exposure a manager has. CEO's may sometimes act like medieval tyrants in private. But showing a lack of control and focus in public - the way Donald Trump does - would make a corporate board worry whether their CEO was still up to the job.
It's true that a woman's competitors in an organization, maybe especially male competitors, are often willing to appeal to prejudice against women in unethical ways. It's also the case that women in work settings may try to portray annoyance coming from a male colleague as intimidating or bullying. And since there are many ways in which interactions between members of a corporate workforce interact with, compete with and cooperate with one another, it's exceptionally hard to claim that one factor stands out in a distinctive way.
Olga Kazan provides an important perspective on this in Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?The Atlantic Sept 2017. She discusses findings that women in organization contexts often express an preference not to work for other women because of a perception that ambitious women will be especially likely to use aggressive tactics against them. This doesn't have to do with expressions of anger per se. But some of her examples show that successful women do express anger in office contexts and that it may benefit their careers.
In other words, it's important to avoid careless generalizations on this subject.
And I have to wonder what the basis is of Traister's claim, "Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back." Is there some basis for this other than Traister's own assertion?
It's also worth noting that Elizabeth Warren expresses various forms of outrage, annoyance and even anger in public. Maybe "Americans" also "rear back" whenever they hear that. And I'm sure that Republicans and corporate Democrats would like them to.
Hillary is a useful template for people to use to discuss issues of sexism and how men and women are often perceived. But when we're talking about whether any other one factor tipped the election, we are confronted with the same problem as with all the other factors. She won the popular vote by a clear margin. So only a minority of the voting population "reared back' from voting for her. And the Electoral College win was decided by less than 100,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's a tiny margin, and it's exceptionally hard to attribute that to any one factor. The chronic media prejudice against both Bill and Hillary is a more likely choice. So is James Comey's infamous pre-election statements on the emails, the latest in a long string of Clinton pseudoscandals irresponsibly hyped by the mainstream press.
I remember seeing it during the primary campaign, in which my own perspective was that of a Sanders partisan, and I thought it came off as churlish. From the post-election perspective of a year and a half later, it still sounds churlish to me. But it also stands as a minor irritation in a primary campaign with much more substantial points of conflict. But did Democratic primary voters "rear back" form that incident? I would guess that Hillary voters were happy to hear it, Bernie voters took it a confirmation of what they thought anyway, and most everyone else never saw it.
In conclusion, I'd note that Trainer quotes Hillary herself in a statement that is telling not only for her personal style but her ideological perspective: “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.”
I think it's fine for politicians to "stoke people’s rage and resentment" if there's a legitimate target on which to focus. Crooked bank CEO's come to mind, for example. But Hillary was running on a theme that embodied a certain kind of complacency, exemplified by her theme of "Stronger Together." Hillary didn't want to campaign on opposition and resentment against the power elite, the One Percent, the oligarchs, the super-rich - whatever term one prefers to describe the ruling stratum of the very wealthy in the United States. So we got lines from her like, "America is already great" in opposition to Trump's (pseudo-)populist theme of "Make America Great Again."
It's true as a general matter that economic sanctions can bring pressure on a country without leading to war. It's also true that our general political culture regards sanctions are a relatively harmless war of pressuring a country that isn't doing what we Americans want. And we don't generally view sanctions as a step toward war. But sometimes they can be.
I'm still bumfuddled by the Senate vote yesterday about sanctions on Russia and Iran. It was hard from the early news reports to tell what they actually about. That's among the few news reports that people were able to find even with the Google machine.
Oh, and there's this:
Two days after Tillerson says US seeks regime change in Iran, Trump reveals he's investigated for obstruction of justice. Who'll fall first?
ThinkProgress generally reflects the corporate Democratic perspective. but they also often do good reporting. Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani reports for them in Tillerson calls for regime change in Iran 06/15/2017, "[Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson was asked on Wednesday whether the United States supports regime change inside Iran. He replied in the affirmative, saying that U.S. policy is driven by relying on 'elements inside of Iran' to bring about 'peaceful transition of that government.'"
Peaceful change? Like in 1953? Or maybe Brazil 2016? What could possibly go wrong?
Given the absence of bilateral ties, Washington lacks sufficient leverage to push Iran in one direction or another to advance core US regional interests—peace, security, prosperity, and stability. Unless the United States changes course, Iran will continue supporting anti-American aims, turning to European, Russian and Asian sources of investment and trade.
We recommend that the Trump administration issue a general license through the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to allow US banks to complete dollar-clearing transactions for Iranian entities, except for those individuals and organizations on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.
A license for dollar-clearing transactions would signal that the United States intends to go beyond the letter of its JCPOA commitments and honor the spirit of the accord, which promised Iran major economic benefits in return for long-term restrictions on its nuclear activities. Licensing would also undercut anti-US rhetoric from Iranian hardliners who maintain that the United States does not want to improve relations with Iran. Iran has a sizeable young, well-educated and pro-Western population that supports relations between Washington and Tehran. The United States should strive to maintain the goodwill of the younger generation; improving Iran’s economy is crucial to this goal.
Approving dollar-clearing transactions would also facilitate increased trade between Europe and Iran. Generally, the more ties Iran has to international markets and to Western countries, the more willing Iran should be to abide by international norms. If the United States facilitates Iran’s integration into international markets, Iran would have more to lose by violating these norms. Moreover, it would lessen the possibility that the European Union or other countries would lobby to have their currency replace the dollar as the global reserve standard.
I remember in the 1990s when Bill Clinton signed off on a Congressional resolution pushed by warmongers committing the US to a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. And we did it in a few years, even though Iraq had given up its "weapons of mass destruction." Libya agreed to give up their "WMDs" and a few years later we intervened militarily to overthrow the same government and leave violent chaos behind. Oh, and the head of state that made the disarmament deal with the US was unceremoniously murdered in the process. Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought that was a big laugh, saying, "We came, we saw, he died." More specifically, he was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered just afterward.
Now Iran reaches a nuclear agreement that goes beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty - and a couple of years later the Secretary of State declares "regime change" to be our policy there, too. And the Senate passes new Bipartisan sanctions near-unanimously.
Hey, North Korea, have we got a deal for you! Give up your nukes and we'll always be nice to you after that, honest to goodness we will! Pakistan? India? Let's talk about you giving up your nukes!
